


Familiar, Alien, Unusual

by doctorsaxon



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 02:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorsaxon/pseuds/doctorsaxon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years after Sherlock falls, he is strongly reminded of his presence.  This reminder leads to him falling back into something he never thought he'd have, for many reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Familiar, Alien, Unusual

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, okay. First fic I'm actually putting on here. I wrote this really spur of the moment, on AIM, for a friend. It made its debut on AIM but then other people saw it on tumblr, I guess, and now it's here. I would appreciate reviews and all that garbage, naturally, but it isn't the best I've done by far. I'll hopefully be putting more soon so... yeah. Uh. Enjoy?

It hurt John Watson to go back to that place, that place where everything he had known had quite literally fallen apart. Slipped like sand through his fingers. Molly helped, let him move in with her, since he couldn't stay at Baker Street. But he would see her face, make an idle comment about her hair, and her face would fall.  
A young girl had wandered into the hospital the other day, chatted her up. Took a keen interest in forensics, pointed out a new nurse John hadn't even known about by the hem of her skirt and the type of shoe she wore. 'Low on money, but paid for new shoes? Definitely trying to impress. And her skirt was bought long and hemmed up, it was let down two -- no, three times.' It reminded John of him. And when he took her aside, she looked at him with the same eyes he did, he spoke with the same tone of voice he did.

'Nobody is truly dead so long as we remember them,' she had said. 'Not really.'  
John stared at her a while, replaying the last two years in his head. The lonely Christmases where there wasn't much celebrating, the forced interactions with the people he met, his limp, his hand.  
'Do you think anyone will remember me?' he had asked her, the girl tilting her head in a smooth, serpentine motion. She stared at him, brown eyes so similar yet alien.  
'It would take a great man, to be sure,' she said at length. She pressed a small hand against John's chest, just in the middle. It could be mistaken for comforting if not for how cold she was. 'Fortunately, I know where you can find one.'  
John Watson was about to object, ask what she meant, when she pushed her back into a strong and familiar chest.

The chest heaved, long arms moving lazily. The body behind him shuddered with present, but uneven, breaths that John recognized as those of someone just getting over pneumonia. He was about to turn around, to snap, when those arms laid gently over his chest. Crossed over it. Gloved hands clutched his shoulders tightly, and his old wound ached from the grip, but hardly enough to shuck off the touch. Not this touch.  
The girl watched him with that still familiarly blank expression. She did not smile, she did not even let her eyes waver from the doctor's until he had relaxed. Her eyes carried upwards then, locking on what was certainly the gaze of the man who had taken up position behind the admittedly short doctor and was now holding him tightly.

She spoke, once again at length, and deliberately as she did everything that John had witnessed. Her head straightened once more, out of its rather uncomfortable looking tilt, and she took in a deep breath before speaking. 'About time you got here,' she said, as if she had been expecting. As if it had been planned. It was then that John noticed (or perhaps she let him) her off inflection. An American accent that shone through in some words. She glanced back to him as if to be sure she noticed, before returning to the eyes of the man over him.

'Yes, you won't believe the procedures for getting through customs as a dead man,' came that, once again, familiar drawl. His heart was skittering, and he could feel the uneven patter of the man's pulse against him through his rather thin work shirt. He was still breathing, why was he still breathing? How was he still breathing? He felt a sharply angled chin rest atop his head as if it were the most natural place in the world for it to be, and the girl took a half-step back, not out of any space boundaries but so she could give a glance down the hall in either direction.  
'Not dead enough, some would say,' she commented, her casual tone sounding almost dismissive to John. and John reacted, making to lunge forward at her, perhaps hit her for the suggestion. But the arms around him held tight, a voice in his ear soothed him. The girl looked forward again, bored with John's outburst before it had even begun.

'Just stating a point, doctor Watson,' she drawled in a voice too like his Sherlock's. He took a deep breath and looked at her now, now that he wasn't so distracted with her similarity to the man he could notice that she was roughly twenty years younger, possibly a bit more, and just about an inch shorter than he was. Her hair was brown and stuck up at odd angles, her eyes glassy and jaded. He tried to think like Sherlock, to take in her clothing. A rumpled dress shirt and jeans. He wasn't sure if it was a disguise, and decided it didn't matter. She was simply unusual to look at, for some reason. Possibly the stark contract between her crumpled appearance and the fine quality of her dress shirt.  
The voice in his ear crooned again, sweetly. 'Let's take a walk,' it instructed. When John wriggled to try to escape that grasp, the man did not comply but turned around with him and refused to let go as they went up to the roof. The girl followed closely behind.

He noticed the arm in a black glove, which he had noted earlier, and a nearly black sleeve. Like his. Rough and knitted, bespoke. He breathed the name to the London air when they stepped foot on that roof, the last place he had seen his heart, his brain, his everything really.

'Sherlock.'  
It was then that the girl sat on the edge, gazing out over the skyline as the man began to speak.  
'John. I'm sorry for lying, for leaving you... I never wanted to do such a thing. I had to. I-'  
'Stuff it Sherlock, I don't care why, or how, or whatever. You're back. You came back.'  
There was a lull, and the man started up again. 'I did. John... those last moments were... painful. Horrible.. but also the bst, most alive...' He trailed off. 'I'm sorry.'  
'Please, Sherlock-'  
'I love you.'  
The words hung there, words unspoken for so long. The girl on the ledge looked up then, gave them a glance, then turned back to the cityscape. They remained like that, the three, for what seemed like eons. The sun slid slowly across the sky, a few pigeons passed overhead, and there was the blaring of a horn somewhere in the distance where a driver or two had had that moment of nearly didn't stop.  
'I love you too,' he returned at last, when the sounds seemed to not reach them. At this, the girl did not look up, she merely let out a soft and almost pitiful sigh.  
'Good,' Sherlock breathed, guiding John to the edge. 'And you trust me?'  
Something in John's head started to turn. Was this really Sherlock? He had never sene his face. Was this a ploy by Moriarty? Moriarty's men? Was he going to be hurled from the edge?

They stopped, John's toes flush to the small wall surrounding the flat roof.  
'Do you?'  
'Yes.'  
There was a weak laugh, nearly a sob, from behind im.  
'I'm so glad to hear that, John... so very glad.'  
The girl smiled a bit, then. Just a bit. She looked over to them both and John thought he saw a glimmer at her back, just a moment. And then, with a sound similar to a parachute opening, John's vision was engulfed in white, peppered with black. Soft, like clouds, perfect.  
And he was being turned, and he was looking up into the face of the man he loved, who smiled back with mounds of feathers encircling them.  
'I'm trusting you not to let me fall, then.'


End file.
